Dr Livingstone, I presume?
11/10/1871 AD met
Livingstone had completely lost contact with the outside world for six years and was ill for most of the last four years of his life. Only one of his 44 letter dispatches made it to Zanzibar. One surviving letter to Horace Waller reads: "I am terribly knocked up but this is for your own eye only, ... Doubtful if I live to see you again ..."
Henry Morton Stanley had been sent to find him by the New York Herald newspaper in 1869. He found Livingstone greeting him with the now famous words "Dr Livingstone, I presume?"
Livingstone responded, "Yes, I feel thankful that I am here to welcome you."
These famous words may have been a fabrication, as Stanley later tore out the pages of this encounter in his diary. Even Livingstone's account of this encounter does not mention these words.
However, the phrase appears in a New York Herald editorial dated 10 August 1872, and the Encyclopædia Britannica and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography both quote it without questioning its veracity.
The words are famous because of their perceived humor, Livingstone being the only other white person for hundreds of miles, along with Stanley's clumsy attempt at appearing dignified in the bush of Africa by making a formal greeting one might expect to hear in the confines of an upper-class London club.
However, readers of the Herald immediately saw through Stanley's pretensions. As noted by his biographer Tim Jeal, Stanley struggled his whole life with a self-perceived weakness of being from a humble background, and manufactured events to make up for this supposed deficiency.
Stanley's book suggests that this greeting was truly motivated by embarrassment, because he did not dare to embrace Livingstone.
Subjects Who or What met?
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Henry Morton Stanley (John Rowlands) Welsh-American journalis...
Objects To Whom or What was met?
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David Livingstone Scottish physician, Cong...
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"Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" an illustration from Stanley's 1872 book How I Found Livingstone
Events in 1871 MORE
